TOM HUMPHRIES/Locker Room: Poor old Ruairí Quinn. Ever since he was diced and sliced by Gerry Adams on the Late Late Show there's been a feeling out there that he's a bit, well, a bit shook. Now he's appearing all over town on those odd posters along with the slogan "Ambitious For Ireland". What's that all about, Ruairí? You want us to do well in the World Cup, do you? Are you ambitious in a motherly sort of way, hoping Ireland goes to college, meets a nice little subcontinent with good breeding and a little money and th

Is Ruairi's ambition of an international quality? Whether it is, it seems crazy to talk about it, it seems like the act of an ambition-crazed madman. Nobody in Ireland is openly ambitious. About anything. Deep down of course, Irish people are as ambitious as the world lets them be. But the distinguishing feature of the green ambition is the pretence that it doesn't exist.

Ambition is to be suppressed more deeply than lust. Anyone who has spent any time involved with Irish sport knows that. As soon as you announce that you are ambitious, an orderly queue forms, people waiting to laugh at you. Behind them comes the mob itching to kick you.

Caesar was ambitious and it was a grievous fault. That's why they taught us Marc Anthony's speech in school. If you're ambitious you keep it a secret; it is part of your most private ablutions. Even if you are ambitious for your kids or, as in Ruairi's case, for an entire country, you don't come out and just say it. We used to have mass emigration as a tool to siphon out the nakedly ambitious from our society.

They would scoot off to London or New York or wherever to be with the rest of the brightest and the best and to do jobs where they had titles like Vice-President Developmental Affairs. The rest of us would hang around here hoping they'd send brown envelopes back. Finally money and the vulgar Celtic Tiger came along and success threatened to make an ambitious failure of our home. We should have known.

Eamon Coghlan was openly ambitious. He wanted to win this and that. He moaned and groaned when he came fourth in this and that. He punched the air when he won. He's never really been forgiven for it. Padraig Harrington is ambitious enough to set out a list of personal targets for every season, but he's smart enough to keep them to himself and we judge him no more harshly than we would a child hoping to get a bike from Santa. Mick O'Dwyer was always ambitious for Kerry football, but if you read the cold ink of the old quotes Micko generally professed to fear annihilation before games and thanked the gods for sparing his team afterwards.

If Ruairí were to reflect the soul of the people he would appear on posters which said "Hopeful for Ireland" or "Fingers Crossed for Ireland" or "Please God Now It Keeps Fine For Ireland". We don't go in for ambition at all. Steve Collins was fine when he was an unblemished battler based in Boston. Then he was born again as Ali-Light and baptised in the church of the WBO. Suddenly his ambition revealed itself in all its appalling naked glory. We just had to look away.

Same goes for the Eddies, Jordan and Irvine, and their high-octane ambition. How often do we remind ourselves of their various career estimates and have a little snicker? Like to be world champion within five years. Ha! Ha! Ha!

It's not our tax system that makes exiles of these people, it's our mistrust of ambition. Ambition is our word for uppity. I can still remember the shiver of unease that ran through us in Amsterdam back in September 2000 when Roy Keane came out and wore his ambition like a top hat. He was tired of all the "win or lose, we Irish will have a party" stuff. Did Roy not understand we were as ambitious as he was but just need to laugh it all off in embarrassment if the subject comes up?

We don't make ambition a virtue here. We don't talk about what we intend to do, whose asses we intend to kick, which masterplans we are carrying the blueprints of. Tony McCoy just wins hundreds of lucky races. Ken Doherty gets a few lucky runs on the table. DJ Carey never scores a goal that wasn't fortunate. Barry McGuigan thanks Mr Eastwood (hey, who said columns had to be topical). We get the rub of the green, we have the luck of the Irish.

We are on the threshold of May, a peculiar time in the sports journalism calendar. Time to be contacting the managers of county teams for preview fodder. Every one of the species presents himself as a secretly ambitious man trapped in the body of a hapless one. Nobody will say they intend to win the All-Ireland, but nobody will allow themselves to be accused of lacking the ambition to win one either. The most rapacious they'll get, though, is when they say that if they get past the first round perhaps they could get on a roll. Hopefully, they'll leave the team better than they found it, they'll give it their best anyway, and sure that's all anyone can ask.

And then the World Cup will be upon us. Roy will be there, his eyes ablaze with ambition and with him the Irish team who will permit themselves to say they hope they'll give a good account of themselves. You can almost tell where the other players in the panel will end up in the hierarchy of national affection by means of judging their ambition quotient. Damien Duff is beloved because for all his brilliance he displays no ambition. Robbie Keane and Clinton Morrison we're not sure about. Niall Quinn's popularity is an index of his flawless self-effacement, and when the sports summer is in full swing the taste of this odd election will still be in our mouths. Ruairí and his flagrant ambition; Bertie, scourge of the nitwit, building his hubristic monument; Michael Noonan still wearing Limerick's finest suntan.

Any wonder why we identify so scantly with those whose ambition is to lead us? It's the ambition itself which seems so un-native.